[badwavemusic]

Perfectly Loud

One evening, when I was living in New York, I was walking in a subway station and the phrase “perfectly loud” popped in my head. I would write down phrases and words like that all the time for later use. I don’t think it meant anything but it sounded kinda cool. And sometimes Pat sends me a track and I don’t know what to write about so I look through my list of words for inspiration. This time I found "perfectly loud" and wrote around that. I’m still not sure it means anything. But it does sound cool.

[badwavemusic]

Into the Red

I don’t think anyone ever thought you could write a song about the stock market, but, well, here it is. The reality is you can find humanity in nearly everything, and that’s what makes a good story. The human factor. The rest is just details. Markets tell all kinds of human stories: euphoria and depression, wealth and poverty, addiction and humility. The numbers on the computer screens are just the backdrop.

“The markets are moved by animal spirits, and not human reason.” –John Maynard Keynes.

[badwavemusic]

Blue Blue Blue

Does anybody look back at high school and not imagine doing everything differently? I grew up in the suburbs where my entire world was the neighborhood homes and the kids from school. I was twenty minutes from South Beach but we didn’t really know what night clubs were. A party for us was in somebody’s backyard while their parents were out of town.

When you eventually go to a bar or club it’s a little step into adulthood. But being sixteen and jumping off a trampoline into someone’s pool, the same pool you jumped into from the same trampoline when you were in third grade, except this time you’re all older, and you're high… that’s not a step into adulthood. That’s just some twisted part of growing up.

[badwavemusic]

I Can Be  A Friend to You

I’ve written a few songs about forbidden love. What I like about this one is that there are several scenarios I imagined while writing it. Different characters and different forbidden reasons. It’s strange how there have always been relationships that are off-limits. Maybe there will always be a line you shouldn’t cross. Or maybe all love is beautiful. Actually no. Now I’m thinking of some weird stuff nobody should ever do.

[badwavemusic]

Coney Island Waltz

This song is a love story. A twisted one, but a love story nonetheless. And like the Cyclone on Coney Island, love will yank you up and down and make you wanna hurl. But all that really matters is you aren’t on the ride alone.

[badwavemusic]

Good Son // Tea Time

Our new video for Good Son is really just an instructional video for how to make a cup of tea.

Sometimes I have a specific vision for a video, sometimes I just shoot a bunch of stuff and the concepts come to me as I edit it together. For Good Son, the only vision I had was: the song makes me want to make a cup of tea. But that may be the most boring music video idea ever conceived. So how does one make tea-preperation interesting? Well you shoot the process in super slow motion at nine-hundred and sixty frames per seconds. Then you overlay it with landscape footage of the Los Angeles skyline (I shot most of the landscapes from the Getty Villa). Then, because Patrick insists people want to see my face, I recorded myself singing in slow motion, which means I have to sing the song twice as fast, which is always fun, and threw that over the whole thing.

And that's how you make a cup of tea.

–TT

[badwavemusic]

Good Son

I think it’s safe to say that moms love their kids more than kids love their moms. And if you read enough Shakespeare you know unrequited love is the worst suffering a person can experience. Seems awfully cruel. But maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be. After all, mother nature works in mysterious ways. But when your mom starts crying as she drops you off at the airport to fly back to your new home across the country, you feel like you could do more to ease her pain. You promise yourself you’ll try harder to be a good son. But you don’t. You can’t.

[badwavemusic]

Deeper Down Music Video

Our video for Deeper Down. It looks like we made it in a nice studio with nice equipment, but we made it in my apartment for no money.

[badwavemusic]

Deeper Down

[badwavemusic]

The Money Music Video

Money is the first Bad Wave music video that we didn’t make ourselves. Cody reached out to us and offered to shoot a video, and of course we were skeptical, but he seemed like a driven and creative dude so we told him to go for it. We really didn’t know what he’d come up with or if it would be any good. We even showed up one night to the shoot in Chinatown and he had these cool colored lights and we just watched him run around with the camera and we really had no idea what the video was about. But when he showed us the finished product we were blown away. We thought it was going to be a quickly thrown together video, but it was super creative and worked great with the song.

Part of the reason we learned to do this stuff ourselves is because people aren’t dying to work for pretty much no money or recognition. So watching someone create something of such quality, and do it because they genuinely like the music and are excited to collaborate, is pretty damn flattering.

Note from Director Cody Dobie: Social influencers are so darkly fascinating to me—their followers demand constant bread and circus and their livelihood is based entirely on maintaining the mirage at any cost. “Money” is just such a sharp encapsulation of that kind of push-pull relationship.

[badwavemusic]

Money – A Song About Money

Some relationships last forever. Most don’t. At some point you might realize the relationship only serves one particular purpose for you. Maybe you need that person for an escape, for sex, or for help fixing your computer. And then there are the people you’d never talk to if they weren’t handing you a paycheck.

To rephrase a Mountain Goats lyric: Some things you do for love, and some you do for money, money, money.

[badwavemusic]

LOVE. is all you need.

We spent a few weeks in Miami this summer, and wanted to do a cover of something popular. Pat made a list of songs that he thought he could do something cool with (one of the songs on the list was Despacito). The Kendrick Lamar song seemed the most earnest of the bunch. It really is a great song and we weren’t just doing a tongue-in-cheek cover of some Top 40 song.

Pat also wanted to figure out a way to use my parents’ Steinway piano which has a built-in player piano thing from the ‘80s. You can put in floppy disks and have it play Cole Porter songs. But we figured out that it has a midi input and can be controlled via the all-powerful laptop. And so he wrote a piano part that only a robo-piano could ever possibly perform.

We tried our best to make the video look like it was shot in a studio. I think we did a pretty good job, but if you were to zoom out a bit, you’d see that we were just picking out the white walls in my parent’s living room. The part where it goes dark we did in the kitchen, with candles leftover from my wedding stacked up behind us. And because we were recording in slow motion, we had to speed up the song, which meant I had to do the rap part really fast, and as you may have guessed, I don’t rap good. So we did a lot of takes and had a fire extinguisher on hand.

The song is about romantic love. But it’s Thanksgiving weekend, so maybe it’s about family love. I mean, it isn’t, but let’s pretend it is. Happy Thanksgiving. Don’t forget that love is all you need.

-TT

[badwavemusic]

1955

January RCA unveils the first music synthesizer.

February Steve Jobs is born.

March Elvis makes his television debut.

April Albert Einstein dies.

May L. Ron Hubbard launches "Project Celebrity".

June Eisenhower is the first president to appear on color TV.

July Congress authorizes all US currency to say "In God We Trust".

August Emmett Till is killed for flirting with a white woman.

September The Attorney General declares use of narcotics at a record high.

October Bill Gates is born.

November Fred Phelps establishes the Westboro Baptist Church.

December Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery.

[badwavemusic]

Time to Get Lost, strings

I thought I’d share the score for the string arrangement at the end of Time to Get Lost, since a) it was fun and b) feels like it needs some explaining!

First, here’s a link to the song — Soundcloud // Spotify

I posted the last few pages of the score after the break, but here’s a link to the full PDF. We recorded the contrabass separately, so this is just the violin 1&2/viola/cello parts. The strings-only ending starts at rehearsal “I”.

I wanted it to be apparent that these are real string instruments, doing things you can’t do with a sample library. This might seem silly, but as someone who has had to make convincing fake strings many times before, I didn’t see the point in hiring a bunch of professional musicians to do something I could do on my laptop. It needed to be outrageous. To this end, I tried to use a lot of extended ("weird”) techniques and timbral modifications (at least “a lot” for a pop song), since this is not easy to do with fake strings on a computer. Examples of this are wherever you see s.p. (sul ponticello, bowing the strings near the end of the string for a sharp, biting tone) or s.t. (sul tasto, bowing closer to the middle of the strings for a round, smooth tone), bow distortion (bowing so hard on the string that it doesn’t produce a pitch, which I learned from Vivier’s awesome piece Zipangu), and the complicated harmonics at the very end (vive la spectralism!).  I also recorded and mixed the strings in a way (large concrete room) that makes them sound a little bad, hopefully in a “realistic” way.

We managed to schedule the recording session right before we both got to Miami, so I jotted down a bunch of ideas on the way and set about making the score once we arrived. I wasn’t totally sure that I wanted to have solo strings at the end, so I figured I’d crank out a few minutes and maybe keep a small portion. I was up all night trying to finish (I use a combination of Finale and Illustrator, which I think is worth it but always takes longer than I expect), finally printing out parts as the string players arrived. Tucker came and brought coffee. ☕️ We had three hours for the session, and somehow got all of this done plus some bonus strings you can hear in 3AM and Daniel. I only cut out a short section, because why can’t the outro be two minutes long? Just now I tried to remember why I wrote this stuff in the first place, and then why I decided to keep it... but I think the best answer is that sometimes it’s good to do something a little ridiculous just because.

—Patrick

Score images below—

[badwavemusic]

Time To Get Lost

When Pat sent me the instrumental music for what eventually became Time to Get Lost, I put on headphones and went for a walk and listened to it over and over. It stirred up some anger in me. Made me want to shout. And it was probably because Donald Trump was running for president and doing very well (this was before the election) and the track seemed to capture a frustration that had become a routine feeling.

So while recording my politically-infused lyrics (in my bedroom, even though I live thirty feet from a recording studio) I took a break to poop. And on the toilet I came up with this melody for the ending, you can hear it around two minutes thirty five seconds. I record that melody, send it back to Pat, he mixes the song, and we’re done.

But as always Pat gets the bright idea to make life difficult and try something experimental. He tells me not to worry, that he’ll take care of it. A week later he comes back with a score for string orchestra and tells me he’s hired some string players to record it. My job is to sit there and hit record while he conducts them. I think it’s a little nuts, but who am I to question his master’s degree in composition. So I’m sitting there, doing my part, hitting record, when suddenly the musicians start playing a melody from the song, and I realize… it’s my poop melody. Some idea I whistled on the toilet is being performed by professional violin players.

But enough about my bathroom habits, let’s get back to politics. I don’t want this song to be taken as anti-Trump. It’s more about frustration with authority. About the lack of representation I feel from those who claim to represent me. Obama said in his farewell address that “citizen” is the highest office in a democracy. This is a song about remembering who’s in charge. Remembering whose name is on the building.

-TT

[badwavemusic]

2016, The Year In Bad Wave

We didn’t mean to start a synthpop band.

A couple years ago we were friends and roommates in Venice, spending most of our free time playing paddle tennis, golfing and hunting down old video games on Craigslist. We were in another band, and eventually out of boredom—or maybe it was just a matter of time—we started writing songs together.

When we made Lookout, our buddy Josh heard it and told us he wanted to release it on his label Crazy Heart Records. He puts it out, it charts on Hype Machine, we google ‘what is Hype Machine,’ and suddenly we are in a synthpop band, even though neither of us ever really listened to synthpop bands.

So, now what? We weren‘t really sure what to do with this new project. We didn’t do much of anything for a while, until we made Runaway. I figured if we were going to be in some indie band, we were going to do weird shit like draw in tempo changes for the choruses.

Fast forward to the end of 2016, and we’ve been totally spoiled by all of the nice things everyone said about us. The Guardian named us their band of the week—like, I read the Guardian! Our songs were played over a million times this year. And the thing that’s genuinely heartening is that when we took chances, that’s what everyone liked the best. The tempo-fuck Runaway chorus, the death-reggae 3AM 2nd half, this is what people responded to.

Y’all may not know us that well, but we really don’t need any encouragement to take chances.

Tucker was put on Earth to tell stories. He’s written a comic, made short films, recorded his own albums; he’s casually mentioned to me the existence of multiple feature-length screenplays. He’d rather tell an insane story about his newborn nephew as the last human about to be executed by the robot rebellion than some uninspired bubblegum lyric, which I think is awesome. As for me, my idea of challenging music is more like this.

Point being, we’re not content to play it safe. We want to do something totally new.

Right now we have seven finished, unreleased songs. That might not sound like a lot, but a year ago we had just one, Runaway. We’ve tried to push ourselves with these new songs. Some of Tucker’s new lyrics really give me the feels, others made me crack up the first time I heard them. For one new song, called “Time to Get Lost,” I wrote a string orchestra part and we brought in players to record it live. It’s got a two minute, strings-only outro, which I genuinely hope you don’t mind.

Not many of you saw our live show this year, but hopefully that will change. We stole our incredible drummer Ben from that other band we were in, and we play as a three-piece with no backing tracks. Everyone we asked said we should use backing tracks—our recordings are pretty complex, and everybody does it now. But playing everything live is super-important to us, and makes the live show a completely different experience, the downside being that it’s a shit ton of extra work (for me, mostly, tbh).

So, what does all of this mean for us in the future? We’re going to go to some new places this year. We won’t go there all at once—it’s a journey, and we’d like to take you with us, not leave you behind. We’re going to take some chances, and we’ll probably do a few things you don’t like, but we’ll make you glad we tried. If we didn’t try, we’d just be another synthpop band, and nobody wants that less than us.

—Patrick

[badwavemusic]

Daniel 360°

We turned the DANIEL music video into a trippy 360° lyric video 🔁🔃🔄